Is "Lean Startup" Right For Your Idea?

Any methodology that forces a founder out of his/her comfort zone into the real world and have him/her talk to real paying customers is a great start. Lean Start-up methodology gets a lot of things right ; however the event which the author attended where people voted on ideas is not actual customer development. The author's contention that PayPal etc. did not use Lean Start-up Methodology is misleading. Lean Start-up methodology, from my limited understanding, is a distillation of what the successful companies got right.

Lean is a general label for "do what produces value, stop wasting time/money/whatever by doing worthless things".

Spiral development may, or may not be lean. Depends on the implementation.